"Pick your calendar wisely"

Over these past few weeks, as I have managed post-flood renovations at home, as well as houseguests, on top of various church and professional work commitments, I confess that there have been a few times I’ve felt a just a little stressed out. And I know many of us here today have had similarly stressful weeks, for one reason or another. We have all felt that way at times, and I am just grateful that my stresses were transient.

There are various types of stress, of course, but mine was simply the breathless anxiety of running from one thing to another, trying to accomplish too many tasks - even pleasant ones - in what felt like too few hours. Of course, looked at in retrospect, some of those tasks were self-imposed, and even some of the necessary ones didn’t have to be ticked off my list quite so promptly. But we humans frequently fall into a problematic relationship with time, operating on overdrive when we are convinced of its scarcity, or dreading its abundance when time hangs heavy and we don’t know how to fill our hours.

Christian writer CS Lewis called the relentless march of time an "aching wound" that we feel "almost equally when we are happy and when we are unhappy." He goes on to describe our uneasy relationship with time:

…we are so little reconciled to time that we are even astonished at it. 'How he's grown!' we exclaim, 'How time flies!' as though the universal form of our experience were again and again a novelty. It is as strange as if a fish were repeatedly surprised at the very wetness of water. And that would be strange indeed: unless of course the fish were destined to become, one day, a land animal.

If it is our soul’s destiny to takes its place in eternity, as Lewis is suggesting, it is no wonder we humans wear "earth time" like a strange, ill-fitting overcoat.

In our scripture readings this week, we hear chronological time (chronos) entwined with references to the eternal, and with kairos (a Greek work meaning the exact right time for crucial action; or what we sometimes think of as God’s timeline).

In our first reading, we gaze into eternity; there is reference to the glory of the Everlasting, to being given evermore the name "Righteous Peace," to "everlasting hills." In the canticle from Luke, we are taken back again and again in chronological time, asked to remember God’s encounters with our ancestors and the words of the prophets of old.  And in the gospel reading we see God’s kairos at work - God’s crucial action placed very specifically within a human timeline. The word of God came to John in the wilderness in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas.

Whew! That’s a very long sentence. Clearly Luke thought it was of critical importance that readers understand that the Word of God was made manifest in the reality of human history.

At all times, and certainly in this liturgical season of Advent, we live with one foot in God’s time and one in our own.  It can’t be denied that our physical bodies are 365 days older than they were at this time in 2023. But in repeating, year after year, the cycle of Advent readings, and preparation, and prayer, we evoke the timelessness of the Holy. We try to feel the truth in the words we say so often when we pray "as it was in the beginning, is now and forever shall be, world without end, Amen."

It isn’t easy to imagine eternity; perhaps it isn’t truly possible to do so. But CS Lewis explained it this way:

If you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must picture God as the whole page on which the line is drawn. We come to the parts of the line one by one: we have to leave A behind before we get to B, and cannot reach C until we leave B behind. God, from above or outside or all round, contains the whole line, and sees it all.

As we prepare ourselves for Christmas, we ponder anew what it means for God to have stepped out of eternity and become caught up in the body of humanity. While incarnation literally means to take on flesh, Christ’s incarnation was also about taking on time. About donning that strange, ill-fitting overcoat of human chronology and all the challenges it brings.

With Jesus’s birth and gradual aging in time, God affirmed as holy the stuff of this earth and the eons in which it unfolds.  God showed us that matter, matters. Creation matters. And then with Jesus’s death and resurrection, God promises that there is also something of the eternal inside each of us; something beyond matter that will live everlastingly with God.

That 'something' isn’t given to us when we breathe our last, of course; it is alive in us right now and can be nurtured alongside our physical body. Can we, I wonder, learn to step into soul time more often than we do? What might that look like?

Perhaps it starts as simply as taking those few mindful breaths, and breathing in God’s peace while we breathe out our daily worries, as we did earlier. Perhaps, instead of lying awake at night thinking about the chores we have to accomplish by a certain date, we can use this time of dark and quiet to wander through time - to immerse ourselves in a memory of long ago, to feel afresh its impact, and then to consider what perspectives we may have gained in the time that has elapsed since.

Perhaps it is to do what the poet Wendell Berry counsels, and to leave behind our worldly fears and anxieties by seeking escape in nature.

"I come into the peace of wild things / who do not tax their lives with forethought / of grief," he writes. "I come into the presence of still water / And I feel above me the day-blind stars / waiting with their light. For a time / I rest in the grace of the world, and am free."

Perhaps it is to bookend your day’s agenda with saying the offices of morning and evening prayer, joining the communion of saints throughout time and space who have done so for centuries. You could even join your here-and-now companions at St. Clement’s who are saying the daily office together Monday through Thursday. I know when I joined Helen to say evening prayer on a particularly busy day a week ago, I experienced an expected and very welcome relief from the feeling I had been carrying with me for days … that feeling that wherever you are, you are neglecting your duties somewhere else. Instead, for that few minutes I felt the peace of knowing that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

Or we can look to our Jewish friends whose faithful, joyous practice of Shabbat - the weekly Sabbath - builds what Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel called a "cathedral in time," and we can choose to make space for the sacred in our own lives, too. Heschel notes that "one of the most distinguished words in the Bible is the word qadosh, holy; a word which more than any other is representative of the mystery and majesty of the divine." He notes that the first time the word is used in the scriptures is in Genesis once all of Creation had come into being, when God "blessed the seventh day and made it holy."

Heschel calls this extremely significant - other mythic religions at the time would have looked to a thing — a mountain, or a spring —  as being sacred; in Jewish scriptures, however, Heschel notes that "When history began, there was only one holiness in the world, holiness in time."

Sometimes we religious folk have been accused of being "so heavenly minded that we’re no earthly good." And it is certainly true that while God’s promise to us is eternal life, our mortal time, too, is ripe with holy potential that we should use well.  Last week Helen quoted Mary Oliver to us, asking what it is we should do with our "one wild and precious life?"

And this week, as I thought about the different kinds of time we can inhabit - linear or liturgical, humanity’s or God’s - I was struck by one author’s blunt advice when he said: "Pick your calendar wisely." Our lives are indeed shaped by this choice.

I don’t think we are called to spend our wild and precious life rushing about in a mad frenzy, ticking items off a never-ending list. Nor do I think we are meant to sit on our hands, just waiting for our real life to begin once we’ve shrugged off the ill-fitting overcoat of time and joined the communion of saints in heaven.

Perhaps, if we accept Advent’s invitation to prepare expectantly for God to show up - to show up at any moment, not just for Mary and Joseph but for each of us, at the coffee counter or in the new office colleague or hiding in a problem you’ve been given to solve - perhaps if we take that invitation seriously, what we do with our one wild and precious life will be given to us. One holy moment at a time.